A while back, the paper by Anderson et al. appeared in PLOS One, and caused a bit of a stir in the press because of its claims that women contributed far more to hunting in various societies than anthropologists thought. The metrics involved what proportion of foraging societies women participated in hunting (79%) and in what proportion of societies women hunted “large game” (33%). This was seen as surprising, but was also sold in the media as showing that women had been unfairly denigrated as the “weaker sex”, doomed to stay home and take care of babies, gathering plants and roots, and only rarely doing the “man’s work” of killing animals. (Of course a sexual division of labor says nothing about inferiority or superiority of the sexes only that they do different things, which are equally important in keeping society going.)
Click the title to read this paper if you haven’t already:
But then a group headed by Vivek Venkataraman (he’s at the University of Calgary) carefully scrutinized the data used and conclusions advanced by Anderson et al., and published a paper in bioRχiv which showed that the Anderson et al. paper was shoddy, containing a number of methodological and numerical errors, all of which conspired to make Anderson’s conclusions false: women appeared to hunt much less than men in both senses. (Note that the rebuttal is very polite, a model of how rebuttals should be written.
Here, for example, is a tweet I posted then listing the many problems with Anderson et al.
I wrote about Venkataraman’s paper on this site, but of course then it was a preprint that had not yet been published, so it didn’t have the imprimatur of publication. Now it has appeared, which i found after reader djc mentioned in a comment that it was accepted in a respectable journal, Evolution and Human Behavior. The paper, which is essentially the same as the preprint, can be found in published version (well, as a corrected proof in press) by clicking on the link below, or accessing the pdf here:
I’m not going to reproduce all the criticisms I and others leveled at Anderson et al. What’s new in the published paper is a figure that summarizes all the issues that Venkataraman et al. find with Anderson et al.’s data (click to enlarge):
The conclusions, if the second paper is right, is that women hunted far less often than Anderson et al. concluded, both in the frequency of foraging societies in which women hunted and the frequency of such societies in which women hunted large game. The related conclusion is that the Anderson et al. paper was not thoroughly reviewed (I’ll give the reviewers a break here: it would be a lot of trouble to look up some of the original data), and at the very least Anderson et al. were inexcusably sloppy. At the most they could have even been tendentious, tweaking and massaging the data so it looks like women hunted more than they did. Here are two paragraphs from the second paper showing the problems of the first:
Insufficient search for source material:
Fourth, though Anderson et al. (2023) investigated each society “by searching through the original references cited in D-PLACE (Binford, 2023; Kirby et al., 2016), and by searching digitized databases and archives,” there are instances in which well-known authoritative sources were not consulted. For example, Anderson et al. (2023) coded the Batek of Malaysia as having female hunters based on Endicott (Endicott, 1984). However, a more recent book by the same author provides quantitative information on female contributions. Endicott and Endicott (2008) wrote: “Still, women procured 2 percent by weight of the animals hunted by nonblowpipe methods and 22 percent of all bamboo rats.” Women procured no animals using the blowpipe (Table 4.1, p. 76) (Endicott and Endicott, 2008). The!Kung were also coded by Anderson et al. (2023) as having female hunters. Yet in her famous ethnography Nisa: The Life and Words of!Kung Woman, Shostak (1981, p. 220) wrote: “!Kung women cannot be considered hunters in any serious way…” A similar case prevails for the Tsimane horticulturalists of Bolivia. The authors cite Medinaceli and Quinlan (Medinaceli and Quinlan, 2018), but they ignore a recent case study on Tsimane women hunting (Reyes-García et al., 2020).
Pseudoreplication:
The fifth issue concerns pseudoreplication, in which the same case is counted more than once. This leads to inflated and inaccurate estimates. There are several examples. The!Kung and Ju/’hoansi are treated as independent points, but these terms refer to the same population (Lee, 1979). The same holds for the Agta and Ayta of the Philippines (Goodman et al., 1985). Moreover, the Efe, Sua, Mbuti (BaMbuti), and Bambote, and the Mardujara and Martu (Martu), are each counted independently despite being members of closely related groups (Bahuchet, 2012; Myers, 1979). We recognize that these errors by Anderson et al. (2023) are not deliberate. Indeed, in at least one case it may be valid to count these as independent data points. The Efe and Mbuti live nearby but are known to have divergent hunting strategies. The Efe are traditionally bow hunters, whereas the Mbuti are traditionally primarily net hunters (Bailey and Aunger Jr., 1989). However, due to the potential for cultural autocorrelation to inflate the frequency of women’s hunting, such decisions should be acknowledged and justified.
These are just two of many problems, and I’d be really embarrassed if I were an author on the first paper. But perhaps Anderson et al. will reply, though I think Venkataraman, given that they use quotes, have them dead to rights.
But really, the Anderson et al. paper got a lot of publicity because it was considered “feminist,” showing that women did more hunting than previously thought, with the implication that anthropologists, because of an anti-female bias, unduly neglected women’s hunting. Unfortunately, that kind of popular analysis is misguided, since women, even if they hunt less often than men, are not inferior: they just have a different role, and one that is essential in preserving societies and cultures.
And I predict that the rebuttal of that paper will probably be ignored by the press, simply because it dismantles a conclusion that was considered “progressive”. I hope not, but we shall see. But anyone calling the second paper “anti-feminist” is dead wrong; it’s just correcting the science, and it says nothing about how we regard women’s rights and value.
UPDATE: Prediction verified: see comment #2 below by one of the authors of the second paper.
h/t: David
As I remember from reading the original paper, their analysis was daft. Didn’t they just use a binary “yes/no” analysis that completely ignored the frequency of male and female hunting within each society?
Yes, our paper debunking the Anderson et al. paper has been overwhelmingly ignored by the press. Soon after it appeared, their paper was positively reviewed in NPR, New York Times, and Science among others. We suspected our critique would be ignored because of the ideological appeal of their inaccurate findings. I believe those that wrote positively would also not respond because it would negatively reflect on their journalistic competence. They did not interview hunter-gatherer experts who had nothing to do with the Anderson et al. study even though this is a common practice.
Our paper was positively reviewed by The Times of London (https://www.thetimes.com/uk/science/article/ancient-man-did-most-of-the-hunting-after-all-claims-scientist-sstlkszmr).* But it may demonstrate a bias in science reporting. The Times of London is a center-right news organization while the ones mentioned above that give it positive press are politically left.
(By the way, I am politically left, but not tribally so.)
*The writer makes some stupid statements about prehistoric humans we don’t subscribe to.
Thank you for your frankness.
You might be correct about the reason your paper is not receiving the same attention as the earlier, incorrect paper. However, an alternative explanation is that the earlier paper represented novel information, even though we now have reason to believe it’s novel misinformation. Regardless, there’s a reporting bias toward novelty in both the news media and in scientific journals.
Many of your readers are scientists and can read and analyze the original studies. I, like most people, depend on scientists and science writers to communicate the conclusions for a layperson. One reason I enjoy this site.
In agreement with the professor that this brand of feminism assumes that what males do (hunting) is better, more admirable, more important, than what women do. Science has been used in the past to justify keeping women in a subservient position. Substantive corrections of such theories, if they still circulate, are welcome. But no, twisting reality is not “feminist”.
It is interesting that women hunt, or participate in hunting, for example, small animals with nets. That information gave me a fuller idea of hunter/ gatherer societies and opened up my previous stereotype of hunting only being groups of men attacking bison.
Proposing that the sex which is larger, more muscular, with significantly greater upper body strength is not almost exclusively hunting large animals rather than the sex who bear and nurse children sounded hard to believe to my non-anthropologist ears. And apparently it shouldn’t be believed.
It was as certain as the sunrise that the media would ignore any evidence to suggest the Anderson paper wasn’t anything but holy writ. Despite the absence from the popular press, I suspect that though the refutation of the appallingly bad science in Anderson was indeed polite, that won’t save the authors from the abuse that will now come their way. After all, they have committed heresy.
We live in interesting times…. deeply stupid times, but interesting.
Anderson at.al. have done a disservice to science and trust of.
Which tells us more about this cohort than we needed to know. Had they been more thorough, rigorous, we would not being squinting at their motives. Tedious when you just want truth.
As for “this cohort”, my co-authors range from oldsters like me to several young female academics in tenured or tenured leading university positions. So, the future is not so bleak.
See ‘replication crisis’ (wiki page on it). Also an obvious case of public media confirmation bias – any science study that validates The political economic Narrative© gets focal attention while anything contradicting it gets buried, kinda like opposition politicians in third world dictatorships 🙂
It’s perhaps worth noting that four out of thee five authors on the Anderson paper (Inc Anderson) were undergraduates when it was written, and still are. The fifth author, professer, appears to be the principal investigator and should bear most of the responsibility for the sloppy analysis.